Hi, everybody! Sorry for the rant!
I’m just posting this as a combination of question and vent. Does anyone else here feel frustrated by the current ethical dilemmas of purchasing games from certain companies? My partner is very tuned into the various ethical mishaps happening in the world and keeps me apprised of which companies are doing shitty stuff and which people/companies I should stop supporting. This is important to remember, but it is also frustrating to see how many companies out there are doing bad things.
This is a very “first world problem,” but it’s frustrating just how many games out there look cool, but I can’t play them because it’d be giving those companies/people money. The biggest examples are Activision Blizzard, J.K. Rowling, and Wizards of the Coast. I think Baldurs Gate 3, for example, looks so awesome, but I don’t feel comfortable playing it because my partner has alerted me that some of that money would go to Wizards. I feel somewhat frustrated that the discussion around these issues has evaporated when the games are released; it’s as though people stopped caring about the bad things these companies/people did. To be entirely honest, I’m not sure if I myself would be able to keep myself accountable if my partner doesn’t remind me of it; I think I may have bought the games like everyone else because of how fun they look, and how much they remind me of games I grew up on.
On a similar note, as my partner is working on becoming a game developer, he follows the state of game development and tells me about it, which seems bleak. I mourn the old studios that I used to have a lot of enjoyment for, like BioWare and the others that EA ate up.
Thanks for reading all of this. :) I wish things were more hopeful, I suppose. My partner urges me to support indie developers, so I’m trying to move in that direction. Does anyone have any recommendations on staying hopeful, given the current state of entertainment?
TL;DR: I’m frustrated by the current largely-unethical state of the games industry and want to know how I can regain some hope about it.
I agree with most of what you said. I think it’s important to be conscious of where our money is going and to be comfortable discussing that with others.
About FF14 and Yoshi-P, however, I’ve actually heard the opposite about his opinion on trans people and NFTs. I heard from my friends (and upon a quick Google search I just did) that he expressed sympathy towards trans community members and that he was trying to keep NFTs out of the game? If you’ve heard otherwise, can you please share the information? I was going to resubscribe to play with my friends, but if you know something, I’d love for you to share it.
I will also check out those companies you mentioned near the end, such as KO_OP and Supergiant!
re: transphobia:
Yoshi-P is a very talented speaker, I’ll give him that. But you have to look at what he’s actually saying. There’s a very pretty preamble about “I’m sad that society, is this way, so my hands are tied…” which is a technique known as impersonation. Whether or not Yoshi-P himself is a transphobe, I guess I can’t say, but the entire speech itself is just straight up transphobia. He then provides a single sad vignette as if to say that can somehow be generalised across all of society, and not just a particular minority view. The ultimate thrust of things is that the small amount of transphobes in the audience are more important than making trans people feel comfortable or welcome.
After I stopped playing XIV, it got much more obvious in context. If I contrast the freedom of presentation in PSO2, which lets you have control over how masculine or feminine your bone structure is, what sex characteristics your character has, and whether you have a masculine or feminine face and to what extent. Beyond that, there’s also a diverse wardrobe for both “Type 1” and “Type 2” in the game’s parlance (which in itself is super cool) to facilitate how you want to present, even if you don’t want to change your body type.
In FFXIV, I was largely stuck using mods to make sure the clothes I wanted were possible. When the game started official porting previously male clothes to female models, they did so with the caveat that your character absolutely must have prominent breasts. Similarly, going in the opposite direction, all the previously-female gear was really revealing and I think meant to be more funny than serious. Bad luck if you wanted to present femme and not just dress up in obvious drag. This might be better now though, I haven’t played in a year and a half.
re: NFTs
I can’t find where he’s spoken against NFTs in general. “NFTs won’t be in FFXIV” is not a general statement of opposition to them. The most I’ve seen is “making a fun game around cryptocurrency would be difficult”, but no actual firm statement of opposition. If Square Enix is as democratic as they say they are, and given Yoshida is on the board of directors, I don’t think the Square Enix push to NFTs is just unilaterally Matsuda.